> This is a serious question that always seems to be glazed over by the open source advocates
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is, or what's so serious about the question with regards to OSS. Most Open Source software are distributed for free. If anyone decides to use it, they use it at their own risk. When you think about it, this is common practice in the Real World: if I let you pick an apple off my tree and you find a worm in it, are you going to hold me liable, and for what could you possibly hold me liable for? (Of course, if I knew that it had a deadly worm in it and still encouraged you to eat it, that's another story.)
This is in contrast to paid software (or services and goods in general), where there is some sort of bi-directional agreement (i.e. I give you product xyz, you give me money). If I buy a carton of milk and it's bad, it makes sense that I should be able to ask for a refund, or get a new carton. Similarly, if I buy a bad MS product that causes real damages, they should be held liable.
His argument seems to be flawed at a few levels. He's wrong in saying that money can't be made from Open Source software. It's harder to rip off consumers, but there are projects that make money through a number of means. He's also wrong in saying that companies that deploy OSS could be hung to dry if the original author loses interest. Because the source code's there, they can just keep working on it.
But his entire argument, or this "flaw" he speaks of, seems pointless. So what, let's say for a second that Open Source is flawed. Now, how does that fit in with the very reality where Open Source is flourishing, and OSS is being deployed by corporations. If it's succeeding, it can't be much of a flaw to start with, now could it?
>Staunch atheism is ultimately only an active attempt at
>ignoring the question what is the divine if it is not G-d, not at
>answering it.
I wish Moshe could've commented on deism, which slips right through this argument without giving any more credibility to organized religions than atheists would give them.
To me, god isn't some being up there somewhere, but the unexplainable in general in which we see divinity. Maybe it's the laws of physics we haven't found yet, or the answer to life and the universe we haven't found yet. Whatever it is, it 's that something that can't be explained yet still intrigues and inspires us.
What I hate about organized religions is that they take that aspect of belief away from ordinary people. I should believe in the god I want to believe in; who are they to tell me what god to believe in or who's hell I'll go to? On the one hand, organized religions will tell you that god is personal, yet, on the other hand, they don't allow for personalized versions of god. You're given the "God" they came up with, and you believe in that or you go to Hell.
Why can't people just say "Here's my god, it's different to yours, but that's okay." Imagine how many less wars there would be, if people could simply accept the fact that people have different beliefs.
How about getting it from that liquid substance that happens to cover 70% of our planet? Last time I checked, water was two parts hydrogen for every part of oxygen.
I'm not sure a 19" iMac makes much sense cost wise. The whole point about the iMac is it's relatively low cost, but with a 19" display, it would probably cost at least $2000. For that price you could get a PowerMac with a 19" flat screen CRT.
Although, I must admit, if they did come out with one of these things, I would seriously consider it for my summer upgrade:-)
> The domain expired on May 28th From the verisign registry
I don't know if this is the case with MacSlash, but I know of someone who's domain got taken like this. He had the domain registered with Network Solutions, but when it expired, he was never notified (either via email or snail mail). NetSol's systems didn't catch it either, until 5 months later when they just deleted the registry and let someone else grab it. His site was getting quite a bit of traffic too (something in the range of a couple million unique hits a month).
Keeping track of your domains' expiration dates is your responsibility, but then, the way NetSol handled it wasn't exactly fair either. I guess that's just another reason why NetSol sucks.
>just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it >takes your favorite Mail program to only display the subjects.
A mailbox with over 1400 messages, using Courier-IMAP, viewing through my webmail interface (see shameless plug below), it takes about 1.4 seconds to sort all messages by size and display the subject, sender, date and size of the first 20 messages.
Personally, I would applaud any such project. The school I go to/work at uses Exchange, and one of the things stopping us from officially supporting OS X is the lack of a native Exchange client (I currently use Outlook 2000 in VPC).
But doesn't it seem a little self defeating in purpose?
I mean, Exchange is a corporate solution, used by large organizations. Large organizations aren't going to buy copies of an OpenSouce solution (if they were so darn OSS-friendly, they wouldn't be using Exchange to start with), not to mention, they won't have very many Macs. Besides, MS has officially announced (in a MBU press conference) that they're working on Exchange support anyway.
I think the project would be better off concentrating it's efforts on Linux, where there's absolutely no support from MS to start with.
>blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and
>packed a punch of several thousand tons of TNT
How "localized" is the effect? I mean, I understand you wouldn't get a huge crater or anything, but "several thousand tons of TNT" is equivalent to a tactical nuke.... It could still do a lot of damage if, say, downtown LA were to be hit (of course, the chances of that happening are...well, okay, it's probably too low to even consider).
...for me, it's ALL about the OS. I guess it depends on what you do, but most people interact more with the OS and software than the hardware.
Quite frankly, I could care less what the underlying architecture is, as long as it runs an OS and software I like working with.
Sure, I know I can get faster, more expandable, and cheaper PCs. But I won't get a PC because none of them run MacOS X. It's not that I'm not famliar with anything else (I use Windows at work, tinkered with Linux+GNOME, and use a Solaris box at school), it's just that I prefer using a Mac over any other alternative.
kakaku.com (the Japanese equivalence of PriceWatch) has it listed at prices ranging from JPY148000-168000, which is roughly $1250 +- 100.
I guess it's comparable to an iBook in price, but with a tiny keyboard and screen, it seems more like a big PDA... I watch DVD's and do some coding on my iBook, but I'm not sure I'd trade it in for this toy (hey, you gotta admit, the thing's a toy even when compared with an iBook).
Oh, and does it run *nix?:-P
Re:Offtopic: web page in Japanese
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
>it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much
You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...
Seriously, it's kind of unavoidable in the development of a language to not be influenced by other languages one way or another. There are funny stories about how, during World War 2, they tried banning the use of English words and had to invent Japanese equivalences for all English-derived words.
>There is no "l", so they use "r"
As someone who speaks both Japanese and English natively, this has always intrigued me. The thing is, it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l". Heck, most Japanese people can't pronounce the "r" sound, yet, in Roma-ji all the "l" sounds are spelled out using "r". IIRC, it used to be that you could use "r" or "l", but apparently the Japanese text input engine for Windows used "r" and reserved "l" as a special case (the Kotoeri on Mac still accepts "r" and "l" interchangeably).
Okay, do you see the part where it says "some people". If you crack open your dictionaries, you will see that "some" is slightly different to "all".
I don't know about you all, but I recall being in a rural area once (in ex East Germany it was), looked up at the sky, and realized how many stars there really were that we didn't see at all in the cities.
Sure, for better or for worse, we've come to rely on electricity and artificial lighting. But at least some of us would like to still be able to go out and see real stars.
But I dunno. Maybe some of you would rather see white LED's hanging in the sky than real gaseous formations that are thousands of light years away.
Even as someone who might be called a "Mac zealot", I can see how QuickTime for Linux would make some sense. Linux is probably a growing market in the viedo industry, and there's at least some hope in expanding as a desktop OS.
On the other hand, I've heard folks from the QuickTime team claim that not supporting Linux isn't really a political issue, as many seem to believe, but simply a matter of not being attractive enough of a market to spend man hours for. After all, outside of Slashdot, Linux users represent a very small group of computer users, and there aren't significant enough reasons for Apple to port QuickTime over.
QuickTime is actually a huge multimedia API, not just a.mov en/decoder. For an example, you can use the exact same API calls to play audio, video, or show images, and supports a wide range of media formats. Sorenson is just one of the video codecs supported by QuickTime.
As for audio, with "Classic" MacOS there's the Sound Manager, and in MacOS X there's CoreAudio. It's really up to the programmer to decide whether to use QuickTime, Sound Manager/CoreAudio, or some combination of both.
Personally, I find the search command (part of the IMAP specs) to be sufficient for finding old messages. I usually have a general idea of which folder a particular message might be and some other key word or information, which is all I need to find the message in question.
Only times I have problems with this is when I have to search through a mailing list archive containing several years' worth of digests... so, I guess a more "intelligent" solution would have it's uses.
I used to work at a used Mac shop in Akihabara (the famed "Electric Town" in Tokyo), and we got some strange requests.
Customers would walk in asking if we had part# 20980928-2398T (or something like it) which would turn out to be the tiniest little plastic part in a Rev A PowerMac 7100 (or some other small unimportant looking part), which the guy would be willing to pay 1000 yen for (and then would go on talking about why it's so special, as opposed to the 20980928-2398Q). Or people would come looking for a "rare" Apple ADB mouse which was manufactured at a specific plant (and after digging through a box full of mice, inform us, with obvious disappointment, that none of the 50 or so mice we had were from that particular factory.
Personally, I found it all quite comical... and scary, at times.
Japan does have a relatively large defense buget, and a lot of modern weaponry (Aegis class missile cruisers, AWACS, etc). However, they go through great lengths to ensure that the hardware they have is "defensive" in nature.
For an example, back in 1998, N. Korea launched a rocked that passed over Japan and landed somewhere in the Pacific. For a while, the Japanese thought (and I know this because I was there) it was an experimental missile launch, and were generally threatened by it. I remember reading an article in some magazine saying how it would be impossible for the SDF to strike at North Korean missile sites, even in self defense. This is because without air refueling capabilities or aircraft carriers, none of the strike aircraft in their arsenal would be able to reach North Korea and return back to base. Needless to say, Japan does not possess long range cruise missles or surface to surface missiles suitable for such a task.
In some ways, I think the SDF is only for show. The only thing they can effectively defend against is a small scale invasion, for which the threat is practically non-existent. But then, I guess most nations have armies that are either self fufilling or self defeating in purpose anyway.
As for nuclear weapons, I'll say this as a native Japanese speaker and someone who understands the land, people and culture: it won't happen in our life time. Sure, Japan has all the necessary technologies to slap up an ICBM in no time flat. But the public/political support for such a move is simply not there... in fact, even suggesting nuclear armament would probably be suicidal for a politician.
With regards, to Article 9 of the constitution (the one banning all wars)... The constitution was written after WW2 (in 1945), and hasn't been ammended (at least it wasn't the lats time I checked), even though there is an article (54 or 56, can't remember which) that specifically allows for ammendments. Why? Because the public (and politicians) feared that making ammendments to the constitution at all would eventually lead to ammendments to Article 9. So they stuck with an outdated constitution for a long, long time. Perhaps that'll help you understand how sensitive this subject is in Japan (and calm fears among some of you who still seem to think that Japan's just itching to go to war or something).
One essential skill in learning *nix systems, that many MS techs probably don't posess, is to RTFM. Installing software on *nix really isn't that difficult, because more often than not, there are step by step instructions in the README or INSTALL docs.
IMHO, another important skill is to go out and find your own answers, instead of trying to get direct support when using OpenSource software. After all, there are very few questions that a simple Google search can't answer, especially when it comes to technical problems.
This is based on my experiences as a programmer at a dot-com in Tokyo. Being a Japanese company, we didn't have nearly as much freedom in some ways, but then, they gave us programmers a little bit too much freedom in other areas (i.e. poor project management).
Flexible hours: They made me be at the office at 10:00am. Since I don't really wake up until early in the afternoon, I usually only worked in the afternoon and stayed late, which was unproductive for the company and for myself.
Set clear dates They tried to let me set my own pace, but I'm bad at that. Given a due date, no matter how unrealistic it is, I'd do whatever it takes to meet them. Otherwise, I'll just drag my feet and do whatever interests me. Of course, this is partially a flaw on my part, but they should've seen that, and besides, setting a timeline is part of project management anyway.
Solidify project requirements first: There's nothing more annoying than being told that I'd have to rewrite what I did the day before because the requirements just changed.
Clear coding guidelines: Yeah, this company didn't even have the most basic guidlines for coding/documenting. I'm sure most surviving tech companies have at least this.
Don't you dare threaten to promote me: Despite my complete and utter lack of management skills, they (the CEO, in fact) actually tried to give me a management position. This actually made me further doubt their management skills.
Money isn't everything: They failed to understand that money wasn't the most important thing for me. I would've preferred a better work environment, a better workstation, better development servers, better managers and various options than money.
I don't have much experience with concurrent development involving many programmers, but the problem seems to be similar to that of parallel computing. In other words, the difficult part is probably in how (and whether) the tasks are split up. If each programmer is given a task that doesn't rely on (or interfere with) anybody else's task, you have a more efficient parallel process. In fact, it's probably possible for some projects to have a "coarser grain" than others, and trying to parallelize such projects might just make it more inefficient.
So the question really should be "how to split up projects efficiently" and not "what tools will magically streamline a poorly managed project?"
If you want friends to be able to send mail from wherever, how about giving them an IMAP account on the server and setting up a webmail interface? This will allow "free flow" of information without "free flow" of spam and virii.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is, or what's so serious about the question with regards to OSS. Most Open Source software are distributed for free. If anyone decides to use it, they use it at their own risk. When you think about it, this is common practice in the Real World: if I let you pick an apple off my tree and you find a worm in it, are you going to hold me liable, and for what could you possibly hold me liable for? (Of course, if I knew that it had a deadly worm in it and still encouraged you to eat it, that's another story.)
This is in contrast to paid software (or services and goods in general), where there is some sort of bi-directional agreement (i.e. I give you product xyz, you give me money). If I buy a carton of milk and it's bad, it makes sense that I should be able to ask for a refund, or get a new carton. Similarly, if I buy a bad MS product that causes real damages, they should be held liable.
But his entire argument, or this "flaw" he speaks of, seems pointless. So what, let's say for a second that Open Source is flawed. Now, how does that fit in with the very reality where Open Source is flourishing, and OSS is being deployed by corporations. If it's succeeding, it can't be much of a flaw to start with, now could it?
>ignoring the question what is the divine if it is not G-d, not at
>answering it.
I wish Moshe could've commented on deism, which slips right through this argument without giving any more credibility to organized religions than atheists would give them.
To me, god isn't some being up there somewhere, but the unexplainable in general in which we see divinity. Maybe it's the laws of physics we haven't found yet, or the answer to life and the universe we haven't found yet. Whatever it is, it 's that something that can't be explained yet still intrigues and inspires us.
What I hate about organized religions is that they take that aspect of belief away from ordinary people. I should believe in the god I want to believe in; who are they to tell me what god to believe in or who's hell I'll go to? On the one hand, organized religions will tell you that god is personal, yet, on the other hand, they don't allow for personalized versions of god. You're given the "God" they came up with, and you believe in that or you go to Hell.
Why can't people just say "Here's my god, it's different to yours, but that's okay." Imagine how many less wars there would be, if people could simply accept the fact that people have different beliefs.
How about getting it from that liquid substance that happens to cover 70% of our planet? Last time I checked, water was two parts hydrogen for every part of oxygen.
I'm not sure a 19" iMac makes much sense cost wise. The whole point about the iMac is it's relatively low cost, but with a 19" display, it would probably cost at least $2000. For that price you could get a PowerMac with a 19" flat screen CRT.
:-)
Although, I must admit, if they did come out with one of these things, I would seriously consider it for my summer upgrade
I don't know if this is the case with MacSlash, but I know of someone who's domain got taken like this. He had the domain registered with Network Solutions, but when it expired, he was never notified (either via email or snail mail). NetSol's systems didn't catch it either, until 5 months later when they just deleted the registry and let someone else grab it. His site was getting quite a bit of traffic too (something in the range of a couple million unique hits a month).
Keeping track of your domains' expiration dates is your responsibility, but then, the way NetSol handled it wasn't exactly fair either. I guess that's just another reason why NetSol sucks.
Actually, the mailbox does use maildirs. I specifically installed Courier-IMAP because of it's maildir support.
However, as the poster above (or in between, whatever) points out, Courier-IMAP may have a nonstandard Maildir format...
>just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it
>takes your favorite Mail program to only display the subjects.
A mailbox with over 1400 messages, using Courier-IMAP, viewing through my webmail interface (see shameless plug below), it takes about 1.4 seconds to sort all messages by size and display the subject, sender, date and size of the first 20 messages.
Am I missing something?
Personally, I would applaud any such project. The school I go to/work at uses Exchange, and one of the things stopping us from officially supporting OS X is the lack of a native Exchange client (I currently use Outlook 2000 in VPC).
But doesn't it seem a little self defeating in purpose?
I mean, Exchange is a corporate solution, used by large organizations. Large organizations aren't going to buy copies of an OpenSouce solution (if they were so darn OSS-friendly, they wouldn't be using Exchange to start with), not to mention, they won't have very many Macs. Besides, MS has officially announced (in a MBU press conference) that they're working on Exchange support anyway.
I think the project would be better off concentrating it's efforts on Linux, where there's absolutely no support from MS to start with.
and
>packed a punch of several thousand tons of TNT
How "localized" is the effect? I mean, I understand you wouldn't get a huge crater or anything, but "several thousand tons of TNT" is equivalent to a tactical nuke.... It could still do a lot of damage if, say, downtown LA were to be hit (of course, the chances of that happening are...well, okay, it's probably too low to even consider).
...for me, it's ALL about the OS. I guess it depends on what you do, but most people interact more with the OS and software than the hardware.
Quite frankly, I could care less what the underlying architecture is, as long as it runs an OS and software I like working with.
Sure, I know I can get faster, more expandable, and cheaper PCs. But I won't get a PC because none of them run MacOS X. It's not that I'm not famliar with anything else (I use Windows at work, tinkered with Linux+GNOME, and use a Solaris box at school), it's just that I prefer using a Mac over any other alternative.
I guess it's comparable to an iBook in price, but with a tiny keyboard and screen, it seems more like a big PDA... I watch DVD's and do some coding on my iBook, but I'm not sure I'd trade it in for this toy (hey, you gotta admit, the thing's a toy even when compared with an iBook).
Oh, and does it run *nix? :-P
You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...
Seriously, it's kind of unavoidable in the development of a language to not be influenced by other languages one way or another. There are funny stories about how, during World War 2, they tried banning the use of English words and had to invent Japanese equivalences for all English-derived words.
>There is no "l", so they use "r"
As someone who speaks both Japanese and English natively, this has always intrigued me. The thing is, it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l". Heck, most Japanese people can't pronounce the "r" sound, yet, in Roma-ji all the "l" sounds are spelled out using "r". IIRC, it used to be that you could use "r" or "l", but apparently the Japanese text input engine for Windows used "r" and reserved "l" as a special case (the Kotoeri on Mac still accepts "r" and "l" interchangeably).
...okay, that was waaay off topic.
Okay, do you see the part where it says "some people". If you crack open your dictionaries, you will see that "some" is slightly different to "all".
I don't know about you all, but I recall being in a rural area once (in ex East Germany it was), looked up at the sky, and realized how many stars there really were that we didn't see at all in the cities.
Sure, for better or for worse, we've come to rely on electricity and artificial lighting. But at least some of us would like to still be able to go out and see real stars.
But I dunno. Maybe some of you would rather see white LED's hanging in the sky than real gaseous formations that are thousands of light years away.
Even as someone who might be called a "Mac zealot", I can see how QuickTime for Linux would make some sense. Linux is probably a growing market in the viedo industry, and there's at least some hope in expanding as a desktop OS.
On the other hand, I've heard folks from the QuickTime team claim that not supporting Linux isn't really a political issue, as many seem to believe, but simply a matter of not being attractive enough of a market to spend man hours for. After all, outside of Slashdot, Linux users represent a very small group of computer users, and there aren't significant enough reasons for Apple to port QuickTime over.
QuickTime is actually a huge multimedia API, not just a .mov en/decoder. For an example, you can use the exact same API calls to play audio, video, or show images, and supports a wide range of media formats. Sorenson is just one of the video codecs supported by QuickTime.
As for audio, with "Classic" MacOS there's the Sound Manager, and in MacOS X there's CoreAudio. It's really up to the programmer to decide whether to use QuickTime, Sound Manager/CoreAudio, or some combination of both.
Personally, I find the search command (part of the IMAP specs) to be sufficient for finding old messages. I usually have a general idea of which folder a particular message might be and some other key word or information, which is all I need to find the message in question.
Only times I have problems with this is when I have to search through a mailing list archive containing several years' worth of digests... so, I guess a more "intelligent" solution would have it's uses.
I used to work at a used Mac shop in Akihabara (the famed "Electric Town" in Tokyo), and we got some strange requests.
Customers would walk in asking if we had part# 20980928-2398T (or something like it) which would turn out to be the tiniest little plastic part in a Rev A PowerMac 7100 (or some other small unimportant looking part), which the guy would be willing to pay 1000 yen for (and then would go on talking about why it's so special, as opposed to the 20980928-2398Q).
Or people would come looking for a "rare" Apple ADB mouse which was manufactured at a specific plant (and after digging through a box full of mice, inform us, with obvious disappointment, that none of the 50 or so mice we had were from that particular factory.
Personally, I found it all quite comical... and scary, at times.
According to their press release: http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/jp/press/020418.ht ml
Peak: 40 TFLOPS
Actual: 35.61 TFLOPS
They also give some numbers for ASCI White:
Peak: 12.288
Actual: 7.226
Unless they're lying in the press release statement, it seems like more than just hype.
Japan does have a relatively large defense buget, and a lot of modern weaponry (Aegis class missile cruisers, AWACS, etc). However, they go through great lengths to ensure that the hardware they have is "defensive" in nature.
For an example, back in 1998, N. Korea launched a rocked that passed over Japan and landed somewhere in the Pacific. For a while, the Japanese thought (and I know this because I was there) it was an experimental missile launch, and were generally threatened by it. I remember reading an article in some magazine saying how it would be impossible for the SDF to strike at North Korean missile sites, even in self defense. This is because without air refueling capabilities or aircraft carriers, none of the strike aircraft in their arsenal would be able to reach North Korea and return back to base. Needless to say, Japan does not possess long range cruise missles or surface to surface missiles suitable for such a task.
In some ways, I think the SDF is only for show. The only thing they can effectively defend against is a small scale invasion, for which the threat is practically non-existent. But then, I guess most nations have armies that are either self fufilling or self defeating in purpose anyway.
As for nuclear weapons, I'll say this as a native Japanese speaker and someone who understands the land, people and culture: it won't happen in our life time. Sure, Japan has all the necessary technologies to slap up an ICBM in no time flat. But the public/political support for such a move is simply not there... in fact, even suggesting nuclear armament would probably be suicidal for a politician.
With regards, to Article 9 of the constitution (the one banning all wars)... The constitution was written after WW2 (in 1945), and hasn't been ammended (at least it wasn't the lats time I checked), even though there is an article (54 or 56, can't remember which) that specifically allows for ammendments. Why? Because the public (and politicians) feared that making ammendments to the constitution at all would eventually lead to ammendments to Article 9. So they stuck with an outdated constitution for a long, long time. Perhaps that'll help you understand how sensitive this subject is in Japan (and calm fears among some of you who still seem to think that Japan's just itching to go to war or something).
One essential skill in learning *nix systems, that many MS techs probably don't posess, is to RTFM. Installing software on *nix really isn't that difficult, because more often than not, there are step by step instructions in the README or INSTALL docs.
IMHO, another important skill is to go out and find your own answers, instead of trying to get direct support when using OpenSource software. After all, there are very few questions that a simple Google search can't answer, especially when it comes to technical problems.
For the sake of "our nation", I hope this was meant to be a sarcastic joke.
I don't have much experience with concurrent development involving many programmers, but the problem seems to be similar to that of parallel computing. In other words, the difficult part is probably in how (and whether) the tasks are split up. If each programmer is given a task that doesn't rely on (or interfere with) anybody else's task, you have a more efficient parallel process. In fact, it's probably possible for some projects to have a "coarser grain" than others, and trying to parallelize such projects might just make it more inefficient.
So the question really should be "how to split up projects efficiently" and not "what tools will magically streamline a poorly managed project?"
If you want friends to be able to send mail from wherever, how about giving them an IMAP account on the server and setting up a webmail interface?
This will allow "free flow" of information without "free flow" of spam and virii.